


A Jagged Refrain

by Blue_Savannah



Category: Friday Night Lights
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-22 06:05:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8275445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Savannah/pseuds/Blue_Savannah
Summary: That evening, Tim gives up on everything and drives home from San Antonio State, blasting some old school George Strait and throwing his textbooks out the window. He lies to himself, tells himself he has never felt freer, even though he knows - - No way Lyla will ever forgive him for dropping out of college.“Oh yeah? Well, fuck you Garrity,” he mumbles to the empty air, trying not to think about how much he wants to.





	

It’s early on Wednesday, the third official morning of college, when Tim Riggins wakes up hungover.

He’s disoriented, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, eyes still blurry with last night’s mistakes. He _thinks_ he skipped yesterday’s classes, _thinks_ he went to one bar, then another, then a third, but he can’t remember for sure. And he definitely doesn’t remember the blonde girl lying next to him in bed, or the sex either, for that matter.

Stirring at his movements, the unknown quantity raises her head, spilling a blonde wave of hair around her shoulders. “Who’s Lyla?”

“What?”

“You were talking in your sleep.” The delicate skin between her eyes creases with consternation. It’s a curious ask, not a possessive one, but now Tim’s past is hanging awkwardly between them like stale air.

Tim licks his lips. It’s too early in the morning, and he’s too hungover for this sort of confession. “OK. Uh-” he starts, a little awkwardly.

He thinks about that night, over a year ago now, post Jay’s accident, when Lyla pulled her car up to him in the rain. Her consummately perfect ponytail was askew, and her makeup had been smudged - the first subtle clues as to her unraveling. He remembers how she’d slapped him, how he’d grasped gently at her wrists to stop her from hitting him, how her pulse had beat furiously against the pads of his fingertips.

He remembers how he’d been so sure that the first kiss was just a comfort thing - at least, until she’d kissed him _back_ \- and how he’d shook a little while loosening the cotton string of her sundress. He remembers sitting in the backseat of her car, circling a hand around her knee, tracing the line of leg back upwards towards her hips, sliding his fingers between her legs.

And he remembers how her face blurred with bliss, how she’d made a sudden, strangled noise, and how that had undone him: her body arching against his, perfect Lyla Garrity coming apart in his hand.

Tim swallows back _that_ memory. “Lyla is gone,” he manages, settling for a half truth. 

The girl leans into him, something feral and lost glittering in her eyes. She’s naked from the waist up, her breasts brushing his chest.

Tim clears his throat, and beckons her with one finger. And so she inches closer, and so he tries to lose himself. 

———————

It doesn’t take Tim long to realize that he’s not cut out for college. The first clue is the classes. There are no rally girls at San Antonio State, and school sucks when you actually have to write your essays yourself. Besides, higher learning was always Lyla’s dream for him, while Tim’s dream was just...her.

He snaps at some acne scarred kid that tries to sit next to him in the cafeteria, has a threesome that weekend with two busty brunettes named ... and finishes the first week of school utterly bored and frustrated.

On Monday of week two, the football team is doing drills in the middle of the afternoon when some blonde piece of ass walks in front of the bleachers, swaying and smiling in a way that says she knows everybody’s watching.

“Totally fuckable,” Tim declares out loud, only because he’s feeling achy and lonely, but it turns out that she’s the girlfriend of the starting tight end, some guy named James. Predictably, James is a walking cliche with enormous arms, a shaved head, and a huge tattoo on his shoulder - he’s the one to throw the first punch.

It’s hard to fight in pads, but Tim has never been one to go down without a fight. Spitting out blood, he clocks James hard enough that his skull bangs into the goalpost. James goes down heavily, pulling Tim to the ground, and the two of them roll around in the grass, struggling to land punches, until Tim drives his knee into James’ nose with a sick popping sound.

James’ nose is broken. Tim is only slightly consoled by the thought of it healing crookedly.

That evening, he gives up on everything and drives home from San Antonio State, blasting some old school George Strait and throwing his textbooks out the window. He lies to himself, tells himself he has never felt freer, even though he knows -

\- No way Lyla will ever forgive him for dropping out of college.

“Oh yeah? Well, fuck you Garrity,” he mumbles to the empty air, trying not to think about how much he wants to.

———————

The stadiums are always packed on game nights in Dillon.

Tonight is no exception, even though it’s pouring rain, and Tim is blinking back water droplets as rain sluices the skies above him. To his right, Billy huddles with Mindy under an umbrella the size of their house, while Buddy Garrity is impervious in a rain jacket and boots.

“Coach is going to focus on the running game tonight,” he tells Tim, as though Tim doesn’t already know this.

“Yeah. How’s that QB playing? The one with the long legs?”

“Vince?”

Tim nods, even though he doesn’t care, even though he’s just filling up the empty space with Buddy so that he’s not tempted to ask about Lyla. 

The East Dillon Lions are abysmal, down by a touchdown at halftime, even though South Pines are the definitively worse team. Luke collides with another running back and almost starts a fight. The one time Vince is able to hit a target, Hastings catches the ball, only to immediately slip in the mud and fumble.

Tim boos along half heartedly with the crowd. He can hear Coach cursing furiously from where he’s sitting a few seats up from the field.

“Where the hell’s the execution?! We should be beating these boys by thirty points! Cafferty, you’re supposed to be one of the best running backs in the district and they’re handing your ass to you!! Vince - you’re dodging left right left right - make up your mind. You wanna dance, you invite these boys to prom!”

Back in formation, the Lions are looking marginally better during the third quarter. The air is shuddering with the sound of wet pads and helmets colliding, as Luke finds a hole in the defense after a 40 yard drive to run the ball in, tying the score up at 14-14. Then, deep in the fourth quarter, Vince finds Hastings in the endzone. The pass is the first truly beautiful one of the night, a long, spiraling throw that has the crowd on their feet, and Buddy Garrity in paroxysms of joy.

Tim is unexpectedly gripped by a second hand rush of adrenaline, watching the Lions celebrate on the sideline. Only a year ago, this was him - this was his _whole_ _life_ \- and now, he is nobody. 

“Go lions!” He hears Tami call from below him in the stands. She clambers down a little awkwardly from her seat to meet Coach on the field, a flash of red hair in a blue slicker, as she kisses him on the cheek. The two of them separate, beaming without a trace of self consciousness, and something painful twists in Tim's gut.

It’s not that he wants to be married, or grow up to have baby Julies and Gracie Belles, and live in domestic bliss. Nothing like that. It’s just - he knows what it’s like to kiss a beautiful woman in the rain, knows how missing someone can fuck a person up, knows that casual sex can’t satiate for long.

He thinks, _I was in love too, once_.

Look how that turned out.

———————

Thanksgiving of that year, Lyla forgoes Texas to visit her mom out in California, and Tim misses her.

He pictures Street amid the skyscrapers of New York City, and imagines Lyla sipping smoothies out in LA - sure, it sounds great and exciting, but Texas is his home. In Texas, you can’t hide behind big buildings or beautiful people. In Texas, all the wide open spaces mean that your heart is laid bare.

But sometimes, emotional honesty is hard work. All that missing Lyla has him sleeping with a bartender from the next town over (she sorta looks like Lyla a little, at least, around the eyes), and waking up the next morning full of self loathing. He’s still working at Riggins’ Rigs, but he goes to Coach the next day and asks if there’s any potential for an assistant coaching position.

Coach squints at him, the brim of his baseball hat pulled down low over his dark eyes. “Is this because you don’t know what else to do with your life, son?”

“No,” Tim shrugs. “This is because...well Coach, I learned a lot from you, and I’d sure like to pass that on to the next generation of hell raisers.”

Coach slaps him on the back, tells him that the path to self betterment is all in the trying, and the very next day, Tim is up to his knees in dirt demonstrating a play to a couple of hungover running backs.

Luke’s face is smeared with rainwater. He hasn’t stopped complaining about the weather, even to breathe, so Tim tells him the same thing he told JD back before the kid turned into a grade A asshole.

“You wanna know why Coach has you practice in all conditions? It’s so that you won’t fuck up, no matter what. You wanna know what happens to fuck-uppers?”

“What happens?” Luke is a little wide eyed. He might be a great running back, but he is still young and impressionable, raised up on stories of Tim Riggins and Jason Street and Smash Williams of the Panthers state championship era.

“If you fuck up,” Tim dead pans, “we lose the game because of you. Because of you, now we’re not going to state, now the whole town of Dillon hates you, and now you’re never going to get laid. FACT.”

Luke sort of goggles at him, and then runs back into formation. The next play is a flawlessly executed pass, a flawlessly executed touchdown.

Coach grins at him in the rain, and Tim gives a big thumbs up.

———————

Tim takes a third job bartending nights.

In between assistant coaching gigs and working part time at Riggins Rigs, he starts saving money. He dreams of buying a house one day; but right now, he settles for buying Cheryl’s trailer and moving it onto his own plot of land.

He works hard, spends a lot of time with Billy and Mindy, talks to Jay once a week, and doesn’t sleep much. He hears from Buddy at a booster meeting that Lyla wants to go to medical school.

“She’ll be the first doctor in the family,” Buddy says, the epitome of a proud dad.

Tim says “Uh-huh”, and wonders if she ever thinks about him. 

He tries taking a couple of girls out on dates, with mainly disastrous results. He finds that he doesn’t know what to do with girls beyond sex, doesn’t know how to look at them over the table of a restaurant and make small talk, doesn't know how to be _that guy_ \- the one who asks about their days, and checks up on their classes and their families.

Tim Riggins, domesticated. How Lyla would laugh to see him try.

Even so, inertia dictates that he move on.

———————

Matt Saracen’s dad dies in January, when the sky is a huge conglomerate sheet of ice, when smashed up slush decorates the trees, when everything else is already dead.

Tim shows up to the funeral in a starched suit, borrowed from Coach, feeling uncomfortable and intrusive.

Saracen is a mess, snappy and morose, watching the service with flat eyes while Lorraine sobs quietly next to him. Tim’s skin crawls underneath the shoulders of his suit. He has never known his dad, only pseudo-surrogate fathers, Coach and Billy, and now he wonders whether it’s worse to have an absent father or to grow up fatherless.

The preacher says a lot of nice stuff. Stuff about how Henry Saracen was a man of courage, a war hero, a man who fought so that others, including his son, could grow up and stay safe.

Tim watches Saracen’s face darken. He is remembering last night on the field when Saracen bemoaned having to give a eulogy for a man he barely knew and barely cared for - a man who’d left for Iraq so he didn’t have to bear the burden of raising up his only son.

Tim decides abruptly that it’s easier to be fatherless. He has never known his father - a fact which sits with him just fine - because he has never had a physical embodiment to project upon. His dad isn’t a symbol, like Matt’s. His dad isn’t someone to blame, someone to hate from afar. His dad was just...not there.

Saracen stands up, painfully segueing into a story about a time when his whole family was together shopping at the supermarket. His dad had been so angry over the choice of toilet paper, he’d decided to buy every brand he could in retaliation.

Tim doesn’t think it’s very funny. He thinks it’s pretty hard to sit through, actually.

That’s when his attention wanders for the first time. He looks across the crowd, and sees Lyla Garrity, _his_ Lyla Garrity, standing like a statue next to Buddy Garrity in black - and everything else goes black for a little while, too.

———————

“Hi.”

That’s what she says to him, when he wanders over there like the fucking idiot he is.

He knows this is a funeral, not a great site for any kind of - _whatever the hell this is_ \- but he hasn’t seen Lyla Garrity in six months, and now she’s standing in front of him, biting her lip, and he _can’t_ -

“I’ll be in the truck,” Buddy Garrity says tactfully. This is just fine, because Tim had forgotten he was even there in the first place.

“What are you doing here?” He asks her, and she shrugs one shoulder. She looks skinnier since the last time he saw her, and there are scattered streaks of red dotted in among all that dark brown hair. Her black dress falls mid-thigh, and there's a bruise blooming just above her left knee. He thinks about asking what happened. 

“Tim, Matt’s dad is dead. Of course I came back for that.”

Tim nods. “How’s Tennessee?” He can hear the bitterness in his own tone, but goddamnit, it’s so like Lyla to come back home for Matt Saracen’s dead dad, and not for him.

“It’s great.” Lyla picks at her nails under the black lace of her dress. “How’s Dillon? Have any one night stands lately?”

Tim scratches at his head. There's no venom in her tone but he feels defensive anyway. “Nah, I’m trying this new thing, called dating.”

Lyla looks up at him, surprise all over her big, brown eyes. “Are you for real?”

“Real as a funeral.”

“Too soon, Tim.”

His mouth quirks. “Maybe. Anyway, I’m no doctor, but I’m working three jobs now, Garrity.”

Lyla smiles, a real one that lights up her face and sends Tim’s heart scudding. “That’s really - that’s really great, Tim. I’m happy for you.”

He can’t say _I love you_ , so he struggles for the next best thing. “D’you, maybe want to come over later? We can catch up. I can make dinner.”

Lyla’s smile hitches, then falters. When her eyes go glittery, Tim thinks about that night in the rain between them, so long ago, now. He remembers how Lyla had wept on his shoulder, smearing snot all over his jersey. Normally, he didn’t allow his football uniform to be treated in that particular fashion, but he always had gone a little weak whenever Lyla cried. Whenever she smiled, too. 

“Uh. Tim, I have a, a -”

He hears _boyfriend_ in the stilted silence between them.

“That’s OK.” Out of habit, Tim thrusts his thumbs into his belt loops - then he remembers he’s wearing this ridiculous penguin suit. “Well, you know where to find me if you ever want to talk or anything.”

She makes an anguished noise low in her throat, but he’s already blocking everything out as he walks away. _It’s OK_ , he thinks distantly, past the furious pounding in his temples, _there's no way she can possibly break his heart anymore than she already has_. Actually - cut his heart out of his chest now, and all you'd find is scar tissue, a flimsy barrier between himself and the rest of the world. 

His throat is tight and hard, clogged like his tongue is swollen up. And the pounding in his heart is a rhythmic beat, a jagged, two syllable refrain: _Ly-la, Ly-la_.

He’s not dumb enough to wonder if hers beats for him.


End file.
